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Alfreda Benson

Friday, April 21, 2017

My pastor has been very critical of my comment that I can't pray for the ISIS people nor can I love them. To me they are an evil group and will kill anyone that gets in their way. God says to love everyone but I can't in this case so is my sin any greater than others who have sinned. I felt the same towards Hitler and his killing of the Jews.

Les Lucas

Monday, February 13, 2017

I am grateful for your thoughts and challenges to love in your piece “ISIS, Stalin, and the Other “S” Word”. I am a follower of Jesus and I struggle with making sense of this reality. For me there lies a dialectic here:
“I am made in the image of God and I sin “I regularly miss the mark” falling short of the glory of God.”
Both of these are constants.
I am in this constant tension. I have said many times as a follower of Jesus I have the potential to act out, to behave as Gandhi, Cory Tin Boon, Brother Lawrence, John Perkins, St. Terese of Avila or St John of the Cross did and also I can act out, behave as Hilter or Stalin or ISIS or Putin or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Most of my colleagues, friends and family would say I act civilly and act out, behave in caring and loving ways more often than not. How I think--using the standard that Jesus set--is at all times so much less.
To love my enemy as myself is so very much about loving myself and all the blatant and subtle behaviors and thought patterns that I live with. That is, the sin in my character and being and how I express it. To wholly accept this state of being, this dialectic that I noted above. I am my brother and I do not want to admit it most often, especially when talking about such physical brutality.
Jesus knew all of this when he was hanging on the cross for me and he still died for me.
I am a family therapist. All of my client families are made in the image of God and also sin--independent of religious affiliation. I use a rephrase of the above dialectic and I say to all of my client families that:
“Your humanity is just fine, it is how you express it that we are working on.”
So how do I make sense of this daily? For me, grace is the bedrock of the journey. God’s unmerited-nothing I can do to get it on my own-favor and love for me…. Me who lives in this constant dialectic of made in the image of God and (as you referenced) missing the mark of living as Jesus did.
That means that I react to the gruesome acts of ISIS that are far away with numbness, sadness, praying for peace, and sometimes asking how did they get to this place that these are the only options available?
I am also aware that when my home was broken into I ran towards the intruder not knowing what I was going to do when I got there—however I did know I was going to defend my wife and property--I am like that Mom who commented about protecting her child.
I am too aware as one of the other persons who commented stated that this area of the world is being used by world powers for their ends and ISIS plays into this. Just as the “Troubles” in Ireland played into bigger geo-political issues in the United Kingdom, different factions who are closer to common beliefs and values than not, were killing each other for political ends.
I asked on 9-11 what led these people (mostly from Saudi Arabia) to the conclusion that this was a satisfactory method to achieve a political end. What part in ISIS, “The Troubles” and 9-11 did these United States play in shaping these groups perception of the world order that these were and are reasonable and strategic methods to achieve Political and Economic ends. By extension what part do I play as I live in this country that benefits from the psycho-social-economic-political-spiritual dominance of others?
A response to all of this (that has made sense for me) is the inspiring story of the Amish community who stood with the man (made in the image of God) who had killed their pre-adolescent children in their school for no apparent reason. They forgave and comforted him, prayed with and comforted his family, stood with each other in court, showing those there, the country, and the world how to use the grace given them to love their enemy.
These acts occurred because they were daily practicing these principles in community, they had passed down attitude and behavior options from one generation to the next. These attitudes and behaviors based on love your enemy and forgive them had become real to them as they struggled with these ideas and concepts. They admitted that they were wanting and lacking in many ways and needed forgiveness themselves. At times they themselves were the enemy.
Finally let me say I am on the journey and cannot do what the Amish community did. I usually push back very hard against God’s encouragement to love my enemy as myself. I many times ruminate about why it is unfair that the world is so bad. On other occasions I can pray for grace to be on them. I know for sure that I would be livid if God took my wife and we did not get to do the plans that we have for retirement. I imperfectly practice redirecting myself back to the “mark” of grace that is the bedrock of this relationship with Jesus. Thanks for loving me for who I am sin and all.
Blessings and Thank God for grace.

L.

Monday, February 13, 2017

LENIN/STALIN/HITLER/ISIS & Co.
This is a war, by devils, against God, waged through fools, as also by those who have been co-opted, to serve, their turn.
We ought not to be persuaded to adopt human designations for it, and to justify any ill-will towards one another.

Mike Smathers

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Yes, we are all sinners and our only hope is to throw ourselves on God's mercy. The fact that we are sinners and we live in a sinful and sin filled world is part of what keeps me from being a pacifist. Aleppo is another. What Russia and Assad did in Aleppo marginalizes what the Islamic State has done. We just don't like to see murder in all its gory detail, but we never see the victims of a Tu160 bomber. As Bonhoeffer came to realize with respect to Hitler sometimes killing is the only faithful answer.

Cynthia Clark

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Eagerly, I read every word following the author’s questions “what are we supposed to do when our enemy … etc.” Because these are my questions also.
The author states that ISIS builds roads, schools, and runs soup kitchens. Like regular, normal caring people. Maybe they’re just like us?
My mind wandered a bit during the discourse on sin and the Roman “rhetorician” Seneca’s profound observation that hating bad men means you hate all men. I get that. Personally I’d go with the book of Romans (“there is no one righteous, not one”) rather than a “Roman rhetorician” to make that point, but hey, the author is familiar with Roman rhetoricians, that’s impressive.
So the question is “what are we supposed to do?” The answer? “Recognize ourselves in the faces of our enemies as they rush towards us to kill us.” Seriously? Because we’re not good, no not one, just lay down and die? Ok, maybe I could make this recognition when the enemy is rushing towards me with a weapon drawn because well, absent from the body present with the Lord, dying might not be so bad…. But when that terrorist is rushing toward my son or daughter, or any innocent person, I’m not going to think of rhetoric. I’m going to fight. And I’m going to ask Jesus Christ to bless my efforts to eradicate the enemy that is rushing toward me. Because I know there is no moral equivalence between myself and an Islamic terrorist.

metin erdem

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Most of the muslim population in the world calls ISIS as a terror group and they are not muslim. They also think as '' Killing a peron is killing all humanity'' .
There is a war in Syria among brothers. The each leader of the fighting groups say that they fight for God. But this can not be true even you are Muslim, Christian or Jewish . All three religion laws order the people to love your brother and share your love and food.
In Middleast a big game is played by developed countries and super powers. And the brothers are used in this play. I hope that muslims will realise that they need to live together in brotherhood as God ordered them.
War is war , terror is terror in everywhere and no religion accept to fight and kill each other. Right , we need to love our enemies. We pray God that they will also stop killing their brothers and return their face to God.
There can not be a religion of a War or terror.

Erna Albertz, Plough.com

Monday, February 6, 2017

Thank you for reading. Do you agree with Armstrong? Does “love your enemy” hold true even in the face of ISIS terror and gore? Please share your thoughts.

Last fall as I was organizing my thoughts for a talk on nonviolence and the Christian call to love our enemies, I accidentally stumbled on a screen full of news photos of ISIS beheadings. A few seconds were enough to sear my imagination: blank eyes in lifeless faces, bright flesh open to the air, the white of tendon and bone and cartilage, blood spilled down the victims’ clothes and on the ground. And above the gore, the triumphant, stern faces of the men responsible for the gruesome work. These awful pictures raised serious questions about the core of my lecture: an uncompromising Christian call to love our enemies rather than bomb them into oblivion.

I gave my talk as planned, trying to put aside the fresh, bloody images lingering in my imagination. Standing at a podium in a warm, comfortable room, surrounded by a gracious gathering of men and women open to discussion and debate, ten thousand miles from the deserts of Syria and Iraq, I felt the familiar ache of doubt I so often feel in church. How can talk of love be anything but naïve, sentimental, and ultimately fatal when the enemy has made a name for itself by standing before a camera and cutting off people’s heads? What are we supposed to do when our enemy waves the ominous black flag of the Islamic State with one hand and fires a machine gun with the other? How are we to feel anything but fear, and respond with anything but violence? “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” but surely not these, surely not now. Evil like this shakes me to the core of my being.

Spectacular violence posted online for the world to see serves both sides in the battle: fear makes the enemy seem large and threatening, and our pundits and politicians use the fear to justify extreme violence in response, which further incites the ambitions of the enemy. Fear begets fear; violence begets violence. If “perfect love casts out all fear,” we first need to get beyond the simple binary of us versus them.

ISIS terror is not random but politically and militarily strategic.

Loretta Napoleoni’sThe Islamist Phoenix is one of a handful of books on ISIS that offer some necessary social and political context. Napoleoni doesn’t soft-pedal the brutality of ISIS – I don’t think anyone honestly could – but she does balance some of its frightening propaganda with facts and clear-headed analysis. The first thing to consider, she says, is that we are dealing with an authentic Islamic state. Western media coverage makes ISIS sound like a gang of well-armed terrorists with murderous nostalgia for a bygone era of fundamentalist religious tyranny, the incarnate Islamist boogeymen of our nightmares. The movement is religious, yes, but Napoleoni says that “beneath the religious veneer and terrorist tactics … lies a political and military machine engaged in nation-building.” The Islamic State is a genuine political entity, controlling significant territory in Syria and Iraq. And though it has sprung up suddenly and with explosive power, its ambitions are grand and explicitly modern. ISIS is building roads and schools, securing and developing infrastructure, issuing driver’s licenses, and running soup kitchens.

The Islamic State’s reputation for terror is a carefully honed facet of its greater political strategy. ISIS skillfully employs social media technology to simultaneously recruit young fighters and supporters and propagate its image as a movement that will stop at nothing to achieve its ends. Its horrific, symbolic acts of spectacular violence are effective only when someone is watching, and the calculating “marketers” for ISIS have found an audience by using the same online tools as the Kardashians. (Unlike Western pop-culture celebrities, the explicit message is gore and terror, not glamour and avarice.) This deliberate marketing has proven effective in recruiting fighters from around the globe and inspiring a steady, rumbling sense of anxiety and fear in the West. The terror, in other words, is not random but politically and militarily strategic.

Historical context shows that ISIS has not emerged from a vacuum. Western intervention in Iraq has contributed to the rise of ISIS in much the same way that Russian and American meddling in Afghanistan helped to nurture the rise of the Taliban. We’re not up against irrational monsters: these are men with serious ambition and power, authentic hopes and nationalist dreams.

I also find a strange sort of comfort in Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread, an extended, sometimes self-indulgent essay on Joseph Stalin, which I read alongside Napoleoni’s book. Around the turn of the millennium Amis was on a Russian history kick, reading, as he describes it, “several yards of books about the Soviet Experiment,” and in his own book he tries to take stock of what he calls “our worst century yet.”

The state-organized spectacle of gruesome murder the Islamic State specializes in is a well-worn political tactic.

Amis’s book is reassuring for me not because it shows that things could be so much worse than they are – a kind of one-upmanship of suffering – but because it shows how things have always been really, really bad; that the state-organized spectacle of gruesome murder the Islamic State specializes in is a well-worn political tactic. Stalin famously – glibly – quipped that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” and he himself was responsible for twenty million deaths, equal to more than half the population of my entire country, Canada. (Twenty million is a very conservative estimate, says Amis; the actual number may have been double that.) Everyone was vulnerable: “About one million children died in the Holocaust,” he writes. “About three million children died in the Terror-Famine of 1933.” Stalin systematically wiped out his political opponents and everyone he imagined could one day become an opponent, along with their spouses, parents, children, and neighbors. “Death solves all problems,” he said. “No man, no problem.” Millions of Russian citizens were slaughtered for what seemed to be no reason but a good tally, as though Stalin pictured the population in a long line and every fifth one with a bullet in his or her brain. Torture, murder, starvation, labor camps, competitive cruelty, nationwide spying, staff hired to kill imagined conspirators, others hired to kill those who didn’t kill enough – in short, total national terror.

So, Napoleoni complicates the simple good-guys-versus-bad-guys binary by adding historical and social context to the ambitions of the Islamic State, and Amis adds historical depth to what can feel like a brand-new, terrifying threat – both of which open the door for the possibility of some response other than simple hatred. Christian doctrine teaches us that we are to love our neighbors without exception, whether they be friend or enemy. For Christians, love is a universal calling. Historically, of course, the practice of love has been spotty at best, a problem which seems to be a deal-breaker for atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but which Christians have never been surprised by because of another complicating universal: sin.

It’s far easier to speak of “evil” than of “sin,” the former carrying an emotional, gut-response that the latter can never summon: Hitler and Stalin were evil; the Islamic State is evil. “Evil” is a resonant term even for those who attach no metaphysical meaning to it. It’s the final word for something so horrible we’ve run out of every other possible descriptor. “Sin” somehow feels a bit too personal; it’s archaic, potentially psychologically damaging, and certainly unfashionable. “Sin” conjures bad memories – or more likely caricatures – of Sunday sermons from Bible-thumping fundamentalists about hellfire for indulging desires for things like sex, good food, and booze. We assume that we’re better than that now – so much less judgmental. Losing “sin,” we’ve unleashed our desires, normalized old taboos, and made shame itself shameful – no need to feel bad about anything anymore, no need for “sin.”

“He who hates bad men hates all men.” Seneca

Because language is a living thing, constantly in motion, sustained and kept alive by how we use it, there are words whose meanings evolve enough so as to be no longer useful. But “sin” isn’t one of those words. It has fallen out of fashion, but we have not outgrown our need of the term. An understanding of sin as disordered, misaligned loves – as the gap between what is and what ought to be – is far more potent and useful than thinking of sin merely as succumbing to one’s attractions to whiskey, dark chocolate, and lingerie. “Sin,” in its true sense, accounts for the basic truth of what we know of ourselves and of the world: things do not line up as they ought; everyone – including ourselves – falls short. Sin is what’s wrong with the world: murder, meanness, rainforest extinctions, bad dreams, right-wing xenophobia and left-wing sanctimony, genocide, suicide, gossip, corporate greed, poverty, famine, child abuse, frivolous spats with your spouse, “smart” bombs, and sex slaves. Sin, all of it. And when it comes to loving our enemies, “sin” is still useful because it serves as a remedy to the inflammatory generals and politicos who tell us that the Islamic State is full of bad guys, and if we kill ’em off, we’ve solved our problem. “Sin” says we’re all suffering from some measure of the same damn problem, and none of us can claim to be pure.

Not to say we cannot differentiate the scale of things. My impatient nagging at my kids isn’t the same as hitting them; buying coffee when I know about exploitative labor is not the same as hiring thugs to beat the workers at a coffee plantation; having ungracious thoughts toward a homeless guy who smells like piss is not the same as dousing him with gasoline and tossing a lit match at him. The fact that we’re all tangled up in sin doesn’t mean we can’t meaningfully discriminate between different sorts of actions or that we throw discernment and wise judgment overboard. But it does mean that we cannot go along with the Manichaean rhetoric of the pundits whose supposed clarity about good guys and bad guys – “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” – serves a one-sided social or political agenda. “He who hates bad men,” wrote the first century Roman rhetorician Seneca, “hates all men.”

The word “sin” is unfashionable, but we still need it for understanding what’s wrong with the world, from the gory spectacle of the Islamic State to the simple fact that I’m not the dad I know I want my kids to have. “The question ‘why?’… is never quite satisfied by the answer ‘individual psychosis,’” says Amis. In other words, we can’t pin the blame on a few bad apples for all the trouble we’re in. Without “sin” all we’ve got is “evil” – read: Stalin, Hitler – and still we’re stuck with our petty annoyances and bad habits and the great structural injustices and social ills and nothing more than our best efforts to get ourselves out of our self-made messes, from the trivial to the genuinely evil. “Both these stories [Bolshevism and Nazism] are full of terrible news about what it is to be human,” writes Amis. “They arouse shame as well as outrage.…This is species shame.” Good news and hope start by taking the full, punishing blows of the bad news, and if that means our feelings get a bit hurt, so be it. “Sin” takes that treasured sense of progressive moral advancement down a few notches; it also brings the humanity of the enemy more clearly into view. Sin is bad news, but it’s true, and better the uncomfortable truth than doe-eyed self-delusion.

In the fight against “evil,” we can justify total war – whatever it takes. But “sin” muddies the waters...

“This line is metaphysical,” sings David Bazan, “and on the one side / and on the one side / the bad half live in wickedness / and on the other side / and on the other side / the good half live in arrogance … and there’s a steady flow / moving to and fro.” Where does the line go? Am I good or bad? Am I a sinner? Am I evil? And what about you? “Sin” says we’re all in up to our eyeballs and nobody’s clean. Christ on the cross cries out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” because things are worse than any of us think. Nobody’s as good as we wish; you’re actually a bad person and so am I, and none of us knows how to handle ourselves very well.

The psychology of self-esteem and self-improvement and the hubris of the present moment say our modest imperfections are little more than a bummer – foibles, unusual tastes, personality quirks, the range of socially acceptable bad habits – and that all of us can get along fine with a few imperfections, just as most of us manage to get by with a mediocre car. “Sin,” though, says things are fundamentally stuck; in the words of the liturgy, “there is no health in us.” The plainest reason I hold fast to my religious roots is not because I think I’m good, but because I know, in fact, that I’m not.

How are we to love our enemies? To label them “evil” makes categorical dismissal the most natural option, even for Christians: “Hate what is evil, cling to what is good.” In the fight against “evil,” we can justify smart bombs, drone strikes, targeted killings, assassinations, torture, invasion, occupation, mass imprisonment, total war – whatever it takes. But “sin” muddies the waters. The goal of talking “sin” is not to obscure the real differences between us. The goal is love, and the means is encounter, the moment when we can recognize ourselves in the faces of our enemies even as they are rushing toward us with their weapons drawn.

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Winter 2017

We Christians are patriots for a different homeland: the kingdom of God. How should we as alien citizens live and how should we relate to our wider society? This issue of Plough seeks to flesh out a communal vision for the church today.